Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

The rain didn’t let up much as we drove downtown, and neither did the stench on the street, which was a very bad sign: weather of that variety, coming at that time of year, could take quite a while to blow on out of town. As it turned out, that day did indeed mark the start of the first really dangerous period of the summer, the kind of natural phenomenon what the papers had taken to calling a “heat wave.” For the next week, average temperatures would not fall below the eighties; and even at night, the humid air and lack of wind would make sleep just about impossible. This situation was not helped by the fact that our investigation soon narrowed down to the tedious business of continuing the search for a talkative member of the group of women whose kids had been under Nurse Hunter’s care at the Lying-in Hospital (a job what had me driving the detective sergeants and Miss Howard to dismal parts of the city or, worse yet, out to the suburbs, over the next few days), as well as waiting for Mr. Moore to hear from his old pal up in Ballston Spa. By the following Monday, some of us were beginning to doubt the existence of this person. Mr. Moore had sent not one but two cables to the man, telling him what we were up to, but he’d had no reply. Such didn’t necessarily mean anything, one way or the other; but it was, given our circumstances and the weather, cause for much frustration.

Add fear to that mix, and you had a truly rocky time. This last emotion came first in the form of occasional appearances in the Stuyvesant Park area by members of the Hudson Dusters. They made no threatening moves, being as they weren’t interested in getting into a scrape so far outside their territory; but it was clear that they wanted to remind us that they were around, and that-cops or no cops-we’d be better off minding our own business. Unsettling as these visits were, they didn’t compare to the several sightings by some members of our team-including me-of El Niño, the Filipino pygmy employed by Señor Linares. Like the Dusters, this little man made no attempt to attack or even threaten any of us; but he was there and watching, knives and arrows at the ready should our investigation actually start to move forward in some kind of dramatic way.

As all of this was happening, the detective sergeants also had to pursue their investigation of affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. They hadn’t reported their progress on this matter to anyone in our group; hadn’t said anything about it at all, in fact, excepting the time they’d requested information from Cyrus concerning the staff of the place, and another occasion when they’d asked me if I’d seen anything in Paulie McPherson’s behavior that might help explain his suicide. I’d told them I hadn’t; and from the disappointed way they nodded at me in reply, I took it that they hadn’t been having much better luck digging information up anywhere else.

Then, on Monday the twelfth, the detective sergeants showed up at Seventeenth Street looking pretty grim. It was late in the afternoon, and the heat wave was still going strong: in fact, the weather claimed its first victim that day, a small child who was struck down by sunstroke and taken to the Hudson Street Hospital (not far, I immediately thought when I heard the news, from the house where Libby Hatch lived her life as Nurse Elspeth Hunter). The Doctor was in his study working, Cyrus was out in the carriage house tending to the horses, and I was in the kitchen, helping Mrs. Leshko clean up half a dozen plates what she’d smashed to bits with the end of a mop during a moment of typically vigorous but destructive cleaning.

When the doorbell rang, I ran to answer it, leaving a wailing Mrs. Leshko to the last of the sweeping up. The detective sergeants were all business when they came in, immediately asking where the Doctor was. I told them he was in his study, and they marched right upstairs, looking like they’d been hoping to avoid this moment but were now resigned to it. There wasn’t any way I was going to miss what came next: I let them get a floor or so ahead of me, then followed on up at the same distance, finally dashing to the study door when I heard it close. Creeping carefully, I made my way to the thing, then lay on the carpeted floor and peered through the narrow crack underneath it, seeing several pairs of feet along with the bottoms of many piles of books and papers.

“We’re sorry to bother you, Doctor,” I heard Marcus say, as his feet came to rest in front of the legs of one of the chairs near the Doctor’s desk. “But we thought we’d better let you know what’s going on with the-other matter.”

There was a pause, and Lucius’s feet started tapping nervously between the legs of the sofa. “The news isn’t bad, exactly-but we can’t really say it’s good, either.”

The Doctor drew a heavy breath. “Well, gentlemen?”

“So far as we can tell,” Marcus said, “there’s no reason to believe that the McPherson boy’s suicide was prompted by anything or anyone at your Institute. We’ve questioned and re-questioned the entire staff, and put together a general chronology of events from the time the boy arrived to the time he died. There’s simply nothing that suggests he was treated in a way that would have sparked self-destructive tendencies.”

“Even members of the staff who don’t particularly like each other,” Lucius added carefully, “-not that there are more than two or three of them-can’t find fault with each other’s behavior toward the boy. As for family-assuming he was going by his right name, we really can’t find any relations at all.”

“I tried myself,” the Doctor added quietly. “Without success.”

“We checked out the cord he used,” Marcus said, trying to sound more optimistic, “and it doesn’t match the materials found in any of the drapery or curtain mechanisms in the building. Which means he must’ve brought it in with him-”

“Which suggests that he’d been contemplating the act before he got there,” Lucius said.

“And that ,”Marcus continued, “will be useful in court, I think. Now-about that court date…” There was another pause before Marcus went on. “Judge Reinhart, who was in charge of your initial hearing, neglected to inform anyone that he’s retiring at the end of this month. His caseload has been farmed out to a series of other magistrates. You, I’m afraid, have drawn Judge Samuel Welles.” I heard a hiss come out of the Doctor. “Yes. You’ve crossed paths with him before, we understand,” Marcus said.

“Several times,” the Doctor answered quietly.

“We don’t know him,” Lucius said, “but we hear that he’s fairly stern.”

“That’s not my main concern,” replied the Doctor. “He can be stern, yes, but I’ve seen him be lenient, as well. And that is the difficulty. He is utterly unpredictable. I’ve never been able to anticipate his reactions precisely enough to structure my testimony accordingly. In addition, he is not a man who requires extensive evidence of wrongdoing in matters such as these. If the state chooses to make a case that throws serious moral opprobrium on the Institute-”

“Which it will almost certainly do,” Marcus said.

“-then the mere fact that the McPherson boy died while in my care may be enough for Welles.”

“Yes.” Lucius’s voice was a strange mixture of hope and gloominess. “That’s why we thought we’d better come-to let you know that it’s really going to ride on the hearing itself. It’s been delayed a bit, by the way. Apparently, Welles will be on vacation until the first week of September, and-”

The sudden sound of people entering the house and loud voices echoing up the staircase made me stop listening and jerk my head around; then, realizing that the Doctor and the detective sergeants could probably hear it, too, I got to my feet and started downstairs, not wanting to get caught eavesdropping. Looking down between the banisters, I could just see Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, and Cyrus pounding up the stairs.